Carrion Scourge_Plague Of Monsters Read online

  Something stuck out of the torn backpack near her feet. It was a laminated sheet of paper. She bent down and picked it up. It was a map of the coast and part of the Antarctic interior. Delambre Station was clearly marked on the map right next to the coast.

  However, there was something else marked down deeper inland. Denise checked the scale and realized that whatever else was located there was almost thirty miles away from the edge of the sea. It was a roughly straight shot south from Delambre Station.

  The map simply marked Delambre Station as a dot with the word Delambre hovering above it. There was a second dot labeled Merovée, though. The map didn’t give any indication what Merovée actually was. Some of the more prominent natural formations nearby were drawn in and labeled, too.

  Whatever Merovée was, it was located on the far side of the mountains, just through a narrow pass. As far as Denise could tell, the trail she and Fletch had been following before they stopped here was the path to this Merovée. She wanted to know more about it, whatever it was.

  The base of the outcropping ahead was littered with fallen boulders and stones. As Denise looked up, a couple of small rocks shifted and fell down the small slope to the very base of the outcropping. They’d come from behind one of the larger boulders about halfway of the slope.

  Denise stuffed the map in a pocket and took another couple steps closer. She waited a moment, but no one appeared. “Hello?” There was no guarantee that anyone could hear her with the wind whistling across the ice.

  They drew closer, and the man in the yellow jacket reappeared. His hood was drawn tight around his face, and Denise couldn’t make out his expression. He could be either very happy or very annoyed to see them, but until he stepped out into the light, Denise wouldn’t be able to see anything other than a dark shadow under that hood.

  “Are you alright? Do you need any help?” Fletch called. The wind tore the words from his mouth and scattered them before they could get halfway to the overturned motor sledge. Denise could barely hear him, and she was standing ten feet away.

  The wind plucked at the man’s yellow hood as he started picking his way over the rocks toward them. Denise and Fletch moved closer, hoping that the outcropping would offer some kind of windbreak and a chance to speak to the man.

  “Parlez-vous anglais?” Fletch shouted, trying again. He turned to Denise and shrugged. “That’s about as far as my français stretches. Other than that, I can ask him where the bathrooms are or to bring us more wine. I learned a couple of essential phrases during the war, and that’s about it.”

  Denise nodded. She was busy watching the man approach them. He was either so numb he was having trouble walking or he was injured. Maybe frostbite. His movements were jerky and uncoordinated. It was like watching a drunk who was receiving electrical shocks every few seconds.

  The man passed the overturned motor sledge, stepping on a satchel bag with a crunch. It sounded like there was something breakable in there. He lurched forward into the sunlight, and Denise got her first good look at her face.

  That’s when she realized she’d been able to see his face the whole time. There was nothing wrong with the light. She just hadn’t realized what she was looking at.

  The man’s face was black with frostbite. The skin and tissues on his face had swollen and disfigured themselves under Antarctica’s intense cold. In places, the skin was dry and flaking off in shreds of great black dandruff. Other sections of his face seemed to have ripped off entirely. Denise noticed the man didn’t have lips anymore. There were just ragged ridges of flesh surrounding his teeth. His nose was a cavernous ruin, and his eyes looked like green grapes that had started to rot on the vine.

  Denise knew a little medicine. Not nearly as much as Cornelia with her nursing experience, but she could set a broken finger or tie a tourniquet in a pinch. This was far beyond anything she knew how to deal with, though. Frostbite wasn’t really a going concern on the veldt.

  The man’s mouth opened into a gaping pit. His gums were swollen like balloons filled unto bursting with gelatin. A number of his teeth had fallen out, and his tongue looked like a big, boiled slug. The cold must have completely destroyed his outer layers of skin and chewed its way down to the nerves.

  Another gust of wind blew the man’s hood back away from his face more. His scalp was peeling away from the top of his skull. Hair clung to his head like patches of bracken and gorse where his scalp hadn’t cracked and split. The man’s ears were little more than black crusts, like something scraped off the bottom of a baker’s oven at the end of the day.

  Denise had no idea how the man was alive, let alone moving about. He must have been caught out here for days or even weeks. Everything from muscles to tendons must be partially mummified.

  And they were supposed to leave this man out here even longer to go get Benoit and his team before dealing with this? No.

  “Fletch, help me guide him over to the plane. We need to load him into the passenger seat and get him back to Delambre Station.”

  “We’d have to leave you behind.”

  “It’s the fastest way. Besides, you can drop him off and get back here in less than an hour. It’s ten minutes out, if you press it. You know how to find this place again. Just follow the trail leading out here. I’ll make it for that long. I can take shelter in one of those crevices. I think I see a cave, too. That’s probably how this guy survived as long as he did out here. Now, come on. Help me get him in the plane.”

  Denise stepped forward with Fletch next to her. The man was still creaking toward them. She didn’t know if the man could really see them, given the state of his eyes. Maybe he was just following where he’d heard the plane touch down. Then again, she wasn’t sure if he could hear anything at all either given what had happened to his ears.

  Even if they got him back to the station right now, Denise wasn’t sure the man would survive very long. They’d have to amputate the most damaged tissue so it didn’t become necrotic and gangrenous. That wouldn’t leave the man with much flesh left to spare. And Denise had read somewhere that warming a person up after they contracted frostbite would damage the salvageable tissue even more. It was like dipping bread in water, freezing it, and then letting it thaw out. The result wasn’t so much reconstituted bread as it was something resembling oatmeal.

  She gestured with her hands in the direction of the plane. “It’s going to be okay,” she lied. She spoke loudly, hoping to guide the man to the sound of her voice.

  The man continued toward her, but that was when Denise started to realize that there was something well and truly wrong. It wasn’t just that the man was obviously suffering from extreme frostbite. There were other signs.

  For the first time, she noticed a large, dried splash of red on the man’s jacket. Then, the wind whipped his hood fully away from his head. The extra light allowed her to see deeper into his mouth.

  It looked like someone had worked on the back of his throat with power tools. The once pink flesh, since turned black, was shredded apart. It almost looked like the man had placed a pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger. The massive damage could have simply been a further effect of the frostbite, but Denise had never even heard of anything remotely like this. If the cold had penetrated so far into the man’s body, how was it even possible that he was still alive?

  “Fletch, hold on a minute,” she said, throwing up an arm.

  Fletch either didn’t hear her above the wind or he was too engrossed with the broken thing in front of them to pay any attention to her. He took another few steps forward, his arms outstretched and ready to lead the man back to their plane.

  The man swiveled his head around and fixed his unblinking gaze on Fletch. Denise realized that the man’s eyelids had frozen and fallen off somewhere, giving him a look of perpetual surprise. His pace quickened, the herky-jerky movements carrying him straight toward Fletch.

  For a second, but only for a second, Denise thought she saw something poke out from the shredded
remains of the man’s throat. All she saw was a glimpse of something pale, something that moved and pulsed, and then it was gone. The man pitched toward Fletch and then crashed straight into him.

  The impact caught Fletch off guard, knocking him over backward onto his butt. Continuing forward, the frostbitten man crashed down on top of Fletch. His teeth gnashed at the air, making loud clicking noises as they chomped and bit.

  Shouting in surprise, Fletch tried to push himself back up onto his feet, but the man in the yellow jacket kneeled down on top of him, slithering over his body. The frostbitten man pinned Fletch on the ice, trying to bite him.

  What teeth remained in the man’s jaws sank into the Fletch’s outmost jacket and tore out a layer of stuffing. The man swallowed the hunk of white insulating padding without chewing, and then he went in for another bite. Fletch squirmed and struggled, shouting at the man to stop, but he couldn’t free himself from the blackened ghoul’s grip.

  Denise fired her revolver in the air as a warning shot. The man didn’t even flinch. He ripped off another patch of Fletch’s jacket, devouring the entire wad of fabric in a gulp. Pieces of insulation stuck to his teeth like fuzzy, white mold.

  She didn’t want to fire directly at the man, not when he was right on top of Fletch. She could accidentally hit them both. This behavior wasn’t just the result of frostbite. There was something truly wrong here. The cold and his own deterioration could have driven the man mad. But this seemed much worse than even a total mental breakdown. This seemed like something else entirely…

  Her feet crunching on the ice, she ran over and kicked the man in the side. Her boot crashed into the man’s side, partially knocking him off Fletch. Even through multiple layers of protective clothing, Denise could feel that the man’s body didn’t feel right. It was reedy, and it felt like his bones were made out of charred sticks that had been hastily bundled together. Something snapped where her foot made contact with his body.

  The man rolled partly off Fletch, but one hand still had a grip on Fletch’s jacket. The hand clinging to Fletch had lost its glove sometime in the past. It wasn’t much more than a gnarled claw. A couple of the fingers had fallen off, and the remaining digits were all black and crooked, like something salvaged off a burnt mannequin.

  Fletch scooted backward, trying to break the man’s grip, but the frostbitten thing clung on. The man looked like nothing so much as a charred revenant coughed up from hell, desperately trying to grab onto something corporeal so he wasn’t dragged back. Fletch shoved the man away, trying to push himself free.

  The man tumbled backward, but his hand remained attached to Fletch’s jacket. It snapped off with a crunching noise not so very different from the sound of their boots on the ice. Fletch rolled over and clambered to his feet before he noticed the hand still stuck to the front of his jacket. He plucked it off. Apparently still unsure about what to make of this new situation, he tossed it back to his assailant.

  The hand bounced off the man’s chest and plopped to the ground. He made no attempt to catch it. At first, he didn’t even seem to register the hand at all, but then he bent down and scooped it up with his other hand, which still had a glove attached. He lifted the hand up and started chewing on it, biting off blackened hunks and swallowing them in great, choking gobs.

  “What the hell is wrong with him?” Fletch turned to Denise.

  “I don’t know,” she said. That was technically true. She was no medical expert. Cornelia might be able to explain what was going on from a medical and physiological perspective, at least to some extent.

  Denise might not be able to explain it, but she could recognize some basic facts. The man in front of them was almost certainly dead. He’d been out here for long enough that he looked like a project Dr. Frankenstein had given up on in despair. Yet he was still up and moving about. Not only was he moving about, but he was actively trying to eat them.

  Score one for St. George’s Squires. There was something deeply unnatural happening down here.

  The man gulped down the last remains of his own hand, swallowing the bones and everything else. Denise and Fletch backed up as he continued to move toward them. Nothing seemed to faze him. Denise had already probably broken one of his ribs, and his hand had just ripped right off.

  She was already sure that it wouldn’t do any good, but Denise fired another warning shot. This time, she planted the round right between the man’s shuffling feet. “Stay back,” she yelled.

  As expected, the shot didn’t provoke any sort of reaction. The man continued toward them with hitching movements that reminded Denise of a steam shovel encumbered with rust.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said to Fletch. He touched the holes in his jacket and nodded.

  The dead man apparently had other ideas, though. He kept shambling after them. Denise didn’t bother firing at him again. He didn’t seem to be able to move very fast. His joints and tendons were probably just as frozen as the rest of him.

  They retreated back toward the plane, putting distance between themselves and the ghastly figure stumbling along after them. He almost looked like he was following them to try to beg for help. From further away, with the details less clear, it almost made her want to try to stop and double back. But then the image of the man eating his own hand came back to her. She already knew that was a scene that would be replaying itself in her nightmares over and over again in the future.

  Reaching the plane, they scrambled up into their respective seats. Fletch took the controls and toggled a couple of switches. Denise looked back. The man was still following them across the ice. She suspected that he’d probably follow them for as long as he could sense them.

  “Hold on a minute,” Fletch said.

  “We don’t have a minute. We need to get moving.”

  “The propeller is starting to freeze. I have to clear that off. The ice on there could create a strain on the equipment. It might tear itself apart while we were in the air.” He hopped out of the plane and dashed around to try to clear some of the icy buildup.

  Denise jumped out, too. “How can I help?”

  “If you start scraping along here, we should be able to…” Fletch looked up. “Actually, on second thought, even working together, we won’t be fast enough. You chip the ice off everything. I’ll try to lead that thing away. Gimme your gun.”

  Denise looked back. The man kept moving toward them at a steady clip. “No. I’ll keep him away. You know best which parts of the plane need to be de-iced. I know more about how to deal with things like that.”

  “But you’re a lady.”

  “Shut up and get the ice off the plane.” She stepped away and trudged in the general direction of the thing pursuing them. Waving her arms, she made sure to get the man’s attention. He started angling away from the plane and more in her direction.

  Now that he was closer again, Denise could tell that the man was no longer among the living. Something horrible had happened to him. And if he had his way, it seemed that he would be happy to do something horrible to Denise and Fletch.

  Denise raised her revolver and levelled it at the approaching figure. She squinted her eyes, focusing on the gun’s sight rather than on the shape it was pointed at. Reminding herself that she wasn’t pointing the gun at a human being, just something that used to be one, she pulled the trigger.

  The revolver kicked in her hands. The sound of the report washed over her before the wind whipped it away. She saw the bullet’s impact on the man’s chest. His yellow jacket rippled for a second almost like a pond after a large rock was thrown into it. The bullet punched a hole through the material and burrowed inward. Instead of a spurt of blood, there was just a neat little hole rimmed by fluffy, white padding.

  Staggering, the man took an involuntary step backward. Denise watched as he recovered and immediately took another step toward her again.

  She’d heard of stories where a bible or a deck of cards or a flask tucked away in a pocket had stopped a bullet.
Anybody who stopped by a Cape Town general store could probably hear a couple of old-timers in the back telling similar stories about incredible escapes and lucky misses during the Boer Wars. Even if the stories grew more fantastical every year, at least a couple of them were probably true. Well, true-ish.

  However, she didn’t think there was any way in hell that just the padding from a few layers of cold weather gear could stop a bullet, not from the kind of revolver she was using. This thing was meant to blow the back of a lion’s skull off in the last couple of seconds before it mauled a person to death. A couple of high-quality parkas weren’t going to do a thing against that kind of power.

  The man drew closer. Denise now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man was dead. Some unknown force was keeping his legs under him and his jaws gnashing, but he was as dead as dead got. Just in case he did have something under his layers that had partially deflected her last shot, Denise adjusted her aim slightly and punched another round into the man’s gut.

  Instead of sending him down on the ground in a hunched ball like any living thing would have down, the man kept right on coming. If anything, he actually seemed to be coming a little quicker, as if he was close enough to lock onto Denise now.

  She checked the revolver. It held six shots, and she’d already fired off four of them. Two warning shots. Two direct hits. She had more ammo stuffed in her pocket, but now she was wondering just how many shots it would take to actually bring the man down. He was already falling apart, and that didn’t seem to be stopping him. The bullets didn’t seem to be having much of an affect. Hell, they weren’t even dissuading him.

  This time, she aimed directly at the man’s head. She pulled the trigger, and the man dropped to the ground in a tangle of limbs.

  Denise stood where she was for a moment. She had seen people shot before. It was never pleasant business, but she knew what it looked like. They didn’t clutch themselves and fall over dramatically the way they did in the movies.